Five Quick Cooking Tips & Tricks from our Kitchen to Yours

Cooking every day gives us plenty of opportunities to come up with nifty little tips and tricks to be efficient and successful in the kitchen. Here are five of our tried and true practices that we encourage you to implement while cooking at home.

1. Grease your meat, not your pan. To decrease oil splattering when searing meat on the stovetop, rub the meat with oil rather than adding it to the pan before you sear. Let your pan get good and hot while you season your meat and lightly coat it in oil. When the pan is hot, sear away without having to shield yourself from splattering grease.

2. Lightly cook your garlic before adding it to a recipe. Raw garlic can be pretty pungent and can develop a bitter taste as it sits. Lightly sautéing it before adding it to a recipe that calls for raw garlic that will remain raw (ie. salad dressings, salsas, etc.) will mellow out the flavour.

3. Peel your celery. Celery’s stringy fibers are tough to chew and can get stuck in your teeth and throat. To prevent this from happening, peel the back of the celery rib (where the toughest fibers are) with a vegetable peeler before snacking or chopping to use in a recipe.

4. Set timers. Whenever you are cooking – oven roasting, steaming, or searing on the stovetop – setting a timer to remind you to check on what you’ve got cooking is key to avoiding many a kitchen disaster. No more burnt pies, mushy broccoli or tough steak!

5. Don’t follow recipes blindly. Use your culinary common sense. If a recipe’s method seems inefficient, do what makes the most sense to you. Likewise if the end result lacks pizzaz, add your own personal flair to it. Make notes on what you changed so that the next time you make it, it will be just as good!

What are some of your favourite kitchen tips and tricks? We would love for you to share them with us!